Defining and Evaluating Performance Measures for Transmission Stations

In recent years, many transmission companies have established sets of performance measures for their customer delivery systems (regional supply systems). Such measures are used for various purposes such as investment, comparison of performance, etc. The asset manager of a transmission system needs to use any available data on asset performance, conditions, utilization and available analysis tools in driving business decisions. Also, performance measures can help quantify benefits of investments over time. This paper proposes some new quantitative performance measures for transmission and load stations. The proposed measures will cover a variety of station related performance aspects such as reliability, security and safety to personnel. The new measures can be used to determine relative station performance, ranking of stations, transmission station component unavailability for the entire transmission network and performance trends. The new performance measures will be illustrated by examples. In order to evaluate the station reliability measures efficiently, a user-friendly computer program, RMT (reliability modeling tool) has been written that analyzes the outage statistics and inventory data for stations in a very large transmission network. The software has many features related to component outage data and will enable the user to compute the new station performance measures in any selected time period. The paper will illustrate how the program works and how intelligent decisions are being made by the software to facilitate evaluation of the station performance